Entering the Rains

Make up your mind that you’re going to stay here with the breath coming in, the breath going out. This ability to make up your mind and then stick with it is called determination.

Today’s the beginning of the rains retreat, and the monks are going to determine that they’re going to stay here for three months. There are a few exceptions that are allowed. If someone has to go teach or has other legitimate business, he can go away for seven days. But otherwise, they have to greet dawn here every day for the next three months, the idea being that the monks live together as a community. They can benefit from learning from one another, try to set a good example for one another. At the same time, it’s an opportunity to accelerate their practice. Whatever they’re lacking in terms of virtue, concentration, and discernment, they can make up the lack. At the same time, lay people often decide to take this as an opportunity for them to follow the example of the monks—to try on, for the next few months, something good that you know you haven’t been able to master yet, but you would like to master.

The happiness we find in life comes from our actions and the skills we master in terms of generosity, virtue, meditation. All those are skills.

Generosity is a skill in that you try to give things to areas where, afterwards, you feel really good that you gave it. It strengthens your own inner sense of being the kind of person who can share, the kind of person who has a wide heart—who can think about the needs of other people not just about your own personal needs.

Virtue is also a skill. There are times when you take on precepts, say, like the precept against lying. Someone comes and asks you for information that you would rather not give them because you think they might misuse it. So how do you not give the information but, at the same time not lie?

The precepts are like laws that you lay down for yourself. They’re very clear-cut. And they’re clear-cut for a purpose. It’s very easy if things are fuzzy for you to fudge the lines in your mind as to what’s skillful, what’s not. In that way, we end up doing all kinds of unskillful things. But when the precepts are clear-cut, and you learn how to stick with them intelligently, then you learn an important skill.

And, of course, meditation is a skill as well. You have to learn how to be mindful, alert, ardent in keeping the mind with one topic—getting it to settle down so that it can see itself clearly—by asking the right questions. Most of us ask the wrong questions in our lives. There’s some suffering; there’s some pain, and we ask, “Who out there is to blame for this?” Or, “What out there is to blame for this?”

The Buddha is saying, you don’t want to blame anybody. If you want to find the cause, the cause is inside. So we have to turn around and look inside. That’s a skill right there, looking at your mind and learning to recognize what in the mind is skillful, what’s not—and not get fooled by its usual arguments.

So there are a lot of areas where we can learn to improve. You want good results in your life? Well, you have to make the causes good. You want to go out of this world brightly. When you go with the precepts, you go with the practice of the Dhamma. And the more solid your practice, the happier you’ll be.

That’s what it’s all about. The Buddha taught the Dhamma for the sake of getting us out of our suffering and into true happiness. The question is, to what extent are we going to accept his Dhamma? And that means, to what extent do we really want to be truly happy? Or do you just want to go for the quick fix and not care about the future?

If you’re wise, you care about the long-term results of your actions. So you look into your behavior right now. What are you lacking in terms of generosity? What are you lacking in terms of the precepts? In virtue in general? What are you lacking in your meditation? Here’s an opportunity to learn from the monks. The monks aren’t going to run away anywhere. They’re here for the next few months, so they can give you advice on how you can perfect yourself in these areas.

In this way, even though this is just a convention—they say it’s a rains retreat, but we get very little rain this time of the year—still, it is a good time to take a retreat from our ordinary defilements and to learn something new to perfect our virtues, perfect our good qualities in mind for the sake of a happiness that spreads around. We get happier when we’re generous, when we’re virtuous, when we meditate. Other people pick up from that from us as well. It’s something that’s good for all of us in all directions.